The Diesel by Thani Al-Suwaidi

I actually finished this about a week ago, but I’ve been busy doing other things: hacking, snorting, waking up in the night with my lungs apparently trying to invert themselves.

But this morning I feel much more human, so: this is my book from the United Arab Emirates for the Read The World challenge. It’s a short novella written from the point of view of a transgender singer, and I was excited to find it, because the few books I’d found from the UAE looked frankly pretty terrible; and gender issues in a rapidly-changing Islamic monarchy… that’s got to be an interesting subject, right?

It didn’t quite live up to my hopes in that respect. I think that what has been happening in the Gulf states recently is really interesting: most spectacularly represented by the building of the Burj Khalifa, the World Cup being awarded to Qatar, the money being pumped into Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain. But the Arabic version of this book (al-Dizil) was published in 1994, and given the speed the Gulf states have been changing, that’s a long 19 years.

And the style is so literary that I’m not sure I would have been completely confident that it was about someone who was transgender if it didn’t say as much in the introduction — though I expect it would be more obvious if you were familiar with the cultural context. The references are clear enough, but there is so much other stuff which is apparently magical or symbolic or poetic — non-literal, anyway — that I wouldn’t have known to take it them at face value.

Which is fine — I (often) like prose which tends to the poetic — but it doesn’t leave me feeling any better informed about social/sexual/gender/political issues in the Gulf. Still, my expectations aside, it should be judged on its own terms as a poetic narrative. And it is interesting, often effective, sometimes striking, sometimes annoyingly opaque.

During the Read The World challenge I have rarely felt that books were too foreign for me (though perhaps that just means I’m missing a lot). But in this case, with the combination of an allusive style and a sensitive subject matter, I feel more strongly than usual that I’m probably missing something.